Ethics in a Vacuum

The Watergate scandals of the early 1970s involved so many lawyers that the
law schools and bar associations felt compelled to placate the public by requiring
students and lawyers to take courses in legal ethics.

Whether this development benefited the public would be hard to say, but it certainly
benefited some law professors such as myself. I taught professional responsibility
(legal ethics) at two prominent law schools and even earned some nice fees testifying
as an expert in the subject.

Once a gentleman’s way of behaving towards other gentlemen, professional
responsibility has become merely another economic regulatory system—the
regulation of the behavior of lawyers. Like all other officially recognized
forms of knowledge, it deals with means rather than ends. In accomplishing whatever
they want or need to do, lawyers must stay within certain limits or they may
get into trouble. The same is true of insurance salesmen. In both cases, you
might teach economic actors to be careful by teaching them the rules and the
danger of getting caught, but you will not teach them to be virtuous that way.

We professors can teach our students how to obey or evade the regulations, but
we cannot teach them to internalize specific moral goals, because we have no
basis or authority for doing so. We live in a nihilistic society where every
individual claims the right to set his own goals without interference. To expect
legal training to provide the goals is unrealistic. On the rare occasions when
legal educators pretend otherwise, they should not be believed.

Today I see a similar charade being played out with the “ethics”
of genetic wizardry. The scientists want to push technology to its limits, while
the investors want to make profits to recoup their huge investments. Both groups
tend to have little respect for squeamish religious folk who object in principle
to promising techniques like cloning. If there is a chance you might find a
miracle cure and be showered with scientific prizes and profits, why not go
for the gold and leave the nervous nellies to their nattering? The corporations
know that they need ethics advisors to craft a strategy for persuading the public
that everything is safe and that they are only tampering with tissues, not lives,
but no one takes the exercise at face value. Ethics is effectively a division
of corporate public relations.

I do not blame any particular individuals for this amorality. The situation
could hardly be otherwise as long as our culture defines knowledge in pragmatic
terms. We can have knowledge only of how to get more of whatever it is we happen
to want, and so that is all we study. If you ask what we ought to want, our
learned authorities can only shrug. That is a matter for personal belief, as
to which each individual is an independent sovereign in his own kingdom of ends.

If ethics is to be more than another regulatory system or public relations program,
it must be based on firm convictions about the purpose of life. When I speak
with Christian students who are interested in going to law school, I can ask
what they feel called by God to do with their lives. Then we can discuss how
the rigorous analytical skills taught in law school can help them accomplish
their goals. I can hardly imagine asking a law school class a question like
“What is God calling you to do with your life?” That question would
be considered either ridiculous or threatening, because it would be seen to
invoke an illusory Being in a setting where it can only be a threat to individual
freedom.

We can teach grade-school children in detail about what used to be called sexual
perversion, because that is promoting the state-sanctioned goal of tolerance,
but we cannot teach seriously about God even in universities, because God is
deemed to be a subject that can only make trouble for everyone. If God is truly
dead and buried, this attitude is defensible, but if he comes back into the
world as I expect he will, it is going to look very silly. The greatest superstition
of modernism is that, when God is scorned and rejected, everything else we need
will still be available. Our recurring ethics crises give us an occasional flash
of light to see the modernist superstition for what it is.

The latest flash of light comes from the debacle in business ethics that led
to the spectacular scandals involving Enron and Arthur Andersen & Company.
What did the corporate executives and the independent accounting firms do wrong?
Stated without cant, they took big risks when that seemed the way to get stinking
rich, and then they got caught when the market turned sour. If their luck had
held, they would still be being praised as creative improvisers who knew how
to bend the rules just enough. We cannot truly say much more than that, unless
the purpose of the energy business and public accounting firms is something
other than making as much money as possible without getting into trouble and
losing everything. Perhaps ethics means no more than knowing when to take a
risk and when to play it safe. If you were asked to explain to a business or
law school class why ethics does mean more than that, and hoped to
be taken seriously, where would you begin?

I can imagine defining accounting as a sacred calling, dedicated above all else
to maintaining honesty. In that case, the best accountant would be the one who
did the most in his professional lifetime to increase the amount of honesty
in business, rather than the one who made the most money or helped his firm
grow to colossal proportions. But who wants to miss out on lots of money just
to pursue a goal like that?

I could say the same about law, defining the legal profession as a sacred calling
dedicated to justice, if we had a culturally authoritative definition of justice.
I am certain, however, that my visionary notion that lawyers should be pursuing
some overriding goal would be seen by many as threatening and even totalitarian.
I do not agree with that opinion, but I admit that the question of ultimate
goals is a difficult one. I can imagine orienting the legal profession to a
coherent goal, but the job would probably require a religious revival and a
century of teaching to make the goal coherent and persuasive.

The alternative to defining ultimate goals is to accept an amoral and chaotic
social order. That is what we have done and the question is: How long will it
take before we learn that this result is intolerable?

Phillip E. Johnson is Professor of Law (emeritus) at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Darwin on Trial, The Wedge of Truth, The Right Questions (InterVarsity Press), and other books challenging the naturalistic assumptions that dominate modern culture. He is a contributing editor of Touchstone.

“Ethics in a Vacuum” first appeared in the October 2002 issue of Touchstone. If you enjoyed this article, you'll find more of the same in every issue.

Letters Welcome: One of the reasons Touchstone exists is to encourage conversation among Christians, so we welcome letters responding to articles or raising matters of interest to our readers. However, because the space is limited, please keep your letters under 400 words. All letters may be edited for space and clarity when necessary. letters@touchstonemag.com